Samsung Galaxy R officially announced, release imminent

It looks like Samsung released the Galaxy S II into the wild, then took a long look at it and considered what it could do to make it cheaper. Throw out the Super AMOLED Plus touchscreen and replace it with a Super Clear LCD panel, make it a tad smaller even, replace the 8 MP camera with a 5 MP unit, make the processor a dual-core 1 GHz Nvidia Tegra unit, and not Samsung’s 1.2 GHz dual-core Exynos part, make the phone a tad thicker (by about 1 mm), and 19 grams heavier.

And it is. The Samsung Galaxy R will be in stores in Europe before the end of this month (or maybe in early August, since this month literally ends on Sunday), and will subsequently become available in all of Asia.

The software is more or less identical to what you see on the Galaxy S II, including Samsung’s own TouchWiz UI layer and various content Hubs. We’ll let you know when you can buy a Galaxy R. And for how much, since unfortunately Samsung stayed mum on the pricing details for now.